When a prospect searches for professional services firms today, they get hundreds to thousands of options. The legal industry competition is insane. Branding your law firm is an effective way to stand out from the peck.

Now, many businesses and even marketing agencies believe branding is merely visual elements like the logo design and website color. Sure, branding calls for maintaining consistency in your marketing materials and cohesive messaging.

But your law firm’s brand describes the personality and identity of your company. It helps prospective clients instantly recognize and remember you.

Beyond brand recognition, branding also achieves other business objectives, such as building deeper relationships with your audience. It’s a core element in a law firm’s digital marketing strategy. Let’s discuss how to create a strong brand for your law firm.

What is Legal Branding

Legal branding is the first impression you make on the people who contact your law firm for the first time. It can be through an advertisement, checking out your website, or visiting your office in person.

Many law firms make deliberate efforts to create a legal brand that has a unique identity for their business. You can communicate your brand to your target audience through your content, tone of voice, unique selling points, visuals, design, and logo.

However, don’t confuse law firm branding with lawyer branding. The former is associated with your law firm but may also reflect you and your attorneys when created, keeping your staff as an integral part of it in mind. However, lawyer branding is your personal brand as an attorney.

Both are essential to connect with your current law firm client and prospects and improve your credibility.

Why Should You Consider Branding Your Law Firm

One of the major reasons to consider branding your law firm is to show prospects your unique value proposition, so they choose you over your competitors.

When done right, your law firm brand can help you get new business. But if you don’t pay much attention to it, it may deprive you simultaneously.

For instance, a law firm whose website was last updated five years ago has outdated online reviews, needs to be more active on social channels, and is branding itself to push new prospects away. They might think this business doesn’t even exist anymore.

On the contrary, a law firm with an updated client-focused lawyer website, many recent online reviews, and recently updated legal directory profiles and social channels is more likely to catch the audience’s attention.

So, your legal brand is a way to build your reputation and encourage people to know more about your law firm and check your legal services.

How to Create a Strong Brand for Your Law Firm

Now that you know what legal branding is and why it is important for your law firm, let’s understand how to create a strong law firm brand for your business.

Research Your Target Audience and Competitors

The first and most crucial step is to know who you’re creating this brand for. The more specific you are, the more effective campaigns you can run, the better results you can get, and the easier and more budget-friendly the process will be.

So, begin by analyzing your current set of audiences. Get a list of your email subscribers, the type of direct traffic you receive, and the people who engage or view your social media content. Then, define your ideal clients and compare the two. It’ll help you know whether you’re targeting the right audience.

When you’re done with it, you should have the age, demographics, location, gender, income, and other similar details of the right type of audience that you need to target.

Researching the right audience will also help you know your market size, competitors, and the local market gap. Knowing these details will assist you in determining your USPs and portraying your position better in the market.

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Define Your Brand Strategy: Be Clear About Your Why and Vision

The moment you build a law firm, you create a brand.

Before creating a solid brand strategy, you need to analyze what you currently have. For instance, what tone of voice do you use in all your communications and content, your current logo, mission, vision, and USPs?

Take some time to think about

• What changed outcome do you expect with the new shiny brand you want to create?
• How do you want your audience to perceive your brand?
• What brand message do you want to convey to your audience?

Be crystal clear on

• Your purpose: Why do you exist?
• Your vision: What future do you want to help create with your law firm?
• Your mission: Why exactly are you doing it?
• Your values: What are your principles, beliefs, and standards of behavior?

One of the best ways to answer these questions is to know:

• Why did you decide to be a lawyer out of every other thing?
• Why did you set up your law firm?
• What motivates you to get out of bed every morning and go to work?

These crucial details play an important role in connecting you with your prospects emotionally.

You can use HubSpot’s brand kit generator to start gathering important resources for your firm’s brand.

Determine Your Personality and Unique Selling Point (USP)

People don’t work with businesses and people they like. Your personality and USPs help them decide whether to choose you over your competitors.

Your unique selling points can be the way you discuss sensitive topics, a diverse team–for instance, we can communicate with you in 10 different languages– responsiveness, or a track record of winning a number of particular types of cases.

What cannot be your USPs are “we provide a free case review” or “we’re affordable,” if many law firms in your area offer a free case review and charge almost the same as you.

To identify your USP, determine your area of specialization. The local market gap can help you understand it. For instance, plotting the type of services your audience requires and your competitors on a graph can show you the market gap—the services no law firm is addressing or is hard to find.

Moreover, when you define your USPs, make sure that you keep your attorneys’ strengths, areas of expertise, and passions in mind. New clients would instead choose an attorney who has already dealt with a similar case or is more passionate about it than someone who’s merely finishing a task assigned.

Here’s how the Wattel & York Attorneys define their USP.

Here’s another good example of a criminal defense law firm’s USP.

Create Your Brand Visuals

Apart from the content, your brand visuals are crucial to your legal brand identity.

Hence, choosing the right type of visuals as logo, color scheme, typography, and fonts, is important. So, you can be consistent on every platform you use to market your legal services—for instance, your website, social platforms, legal directories, Google My Business account, business cards, billboards, etc.

Make sure the type of visuals you choose represent your brand personality, resonate with your audience, reflect your culture, communicate the right emotions, and are relevant to your law firm.

For example, the brand visuals of the McClellan Law Firm show that they’re high-standard, confident attorneys who know how to win for their clients.

Develop Your Brand Voice and Tone

Your brand voice and tone are how you communicate with your audience. For instance, do you want to go with a formal tone or define law topics in a casual tone? Even though there are no hard fast rules for it, as long as your message is clear to your audience and consistent throughout, you’re good to go.

One way to define your brand’s tone of voice is to go through your core values and reflect on how your law firm is unique. Your mission statement and brand message can help you figure these things out.

For example, the family law firm, Schoenberg Family Law Group, uses a casual tone on its website that resonates with its audience perfectly.

How to Find Your Brand Voice (AND MAKE PEOPLE FALL IN LOVE WITH IT)

Focus on Clarity and Consistency

Clarity helps your audience understand your brand promise. Consistency is what helps them remember it. Hence, these two are the most important aspects of your branding strategy.

The four essential things you need to communicate are what you do, what differentiates you from your competitors, what your value proposition is, and how you can help your clients.

Besides that, be consistent with your brand representation on every platform you use to market your law firm. It builds a cohesive experience, trust, loyalty, and a lasting connection with your audience.

Role of Website Design in Establishing the Brands of Law Firms

Your website is where your prospects will eventually land. It’s like your online office. So, you need to make sure they come to a place that represents you and your brand the right way. And this is the place where you start building your brand strategy from.

Hence, you must have a client-centric website that ensures a great customer experience and encourages them to take action.

Generate Brand Awareness for Your Law Firm’s Brand

Finally, if you don’t invest in brand awareness, your efforts to create a successful law firm brand go in vain. Hence, it’s essential to promote your brand to let more and more people know about it.

Some of the best ways to do it are:

• to have a proper marketing strategy in place,
• creating shareable content,
• contributing to your local community,
• offering free consultations,
• having social media presence,
• listing your law firm profile on legal directories,
• and redesigning the website for SEO to rank!

Additionally, measure your reach based on it. For instance, how many people have started to recognize your brand, how many people are discovering it daily, or how many impressions are you getting—the number of new followers, likes, views, or direct traffic are some good metrics, to begin with.

Parting Note: Brand Identities Evolve Over Time

With time, things change, needs advance, businesses expand, and brands evolve. The change is inevitable. But some things regarding your business may remain the same, for example, your brand values and mission, unless you’re going through a drastic change.

To ensure that you always move at the right pace with the market, take a step back, review your existing brand identity, and implement the required changes.